Police granted rare access to forensic evidence as part of recruitment course
AUSTRALIAN Federal Police forensic recruits will examine evidence from the Azaria Chamberlain case in a unique exercise that Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton hopes will make them better cops.
National
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LINDY Chamberlain-Creighton has called on future forensic police to set aside preconceptions and “test and retest” their scientific assumptions so there can never be another Azaria case in Australia.
Her call to Australian Federal Police forensic recruits came after she gave her blessing to their unprecedented access to rare forensic items from the case which made global headlines in August 1980 when a dingo snatched the two-month old Azaria during a family camping trip to Uluru, then known as Ayers Rock.
In what the AFP has hailed “a real coup and privilege”, its recruits were granted one-off access as part of an induction program to some of the 250 case-related items held now at the National Museum of Australia.
‘This is a first for us and a real milestone opportunity to look back at a slice of our history, where forensic science played such a significant part in leading to a very controversial conviction,” AFP’s chief forensic scientist Dr Sarah Benson said of the visit. “There are great lessons here for all of us to learn from.”
Following high profile inquests and a subsequent court case, Lindy Chamberlain was convicted of murder and jailed in 1982. Azaria’s matinee jacket was found by police by chance four years later, partially buried near a dingo’s lair with the evidence and other elements acquitting her in 1988.
It was forensics that convicted her and exonerated her with early scientific assumptions claiming 22 alleged stains of foetal haemoglobin, from a baby of six months or younger, were in the Chamberlain’s 1977 Torana; they were later found to be sound deadener spray caused during the car’s manufacture.
Such was the uniqueness and sensitivities of the police access to the collection last fortnight, the NMA contacted the now 70-year-old Ms Chamberlain.
NMA senior curator Dr Sophie Jenson told the recruits: “I asked Lindy if she had anything specific that she wanted me to say to you today, she asked me to emphasise to you that when you are faced with a new task, a new case, that you examine your preconceptions. That you test your assumptions and then test them again.”
Dr Jenson has spoken to Ms Chamberlain-Creighton many times over the years but the AFP visit, by agents most of whom were not born when the case was making headlines, was a first and she was not sure how she would react to police access to these items again.
Ms Chamberlain-Creighton told her she was “so pleased”.
“In some ways your presence here today helped to confirm to her the value of all that she has done in terms of documenting her experiences, and most importantly — of making them, and her story, public property and an ongoing archive for us all,” she told the AFP recruits who are the first intake of the AFP’s specialist capabilities commitment under the Federal Government’s 2017/18 Budget.